HISTORY TIP OF THE DAY

The Boston Massacre, March 5th, 1770

The city is alive with danger. Two British soldiers are attacked and beaten. Then about three hundred colonists attack a regiment of British soldiers, pelting them with ice and snowballs. What happens next will be disputed by both sides, but soldiers begin firing into the crowd. A forty-seven-year-old mulatto sailor named Crispus Attucks is struck by two bullets in the chest and thus becomes the first casualty of battle of the Revolutionary War. Two others will die and six more are injured. The confrontation lasts no more than twenty minutes, but it resonates throughout the colonies and the British Empire.